Archive for loss

A landscape of scarred pew backs
Faded under used up onion skin sunlight
Sweat and salivation
Something hungry and panting lustful
Beneath linen suit and tie,
Hollowed out eyes glinting feverish bright
The cut and fit slim difference
Between any other carnival barker.

All the things you want to hear
Slow comfort honey drip, drip, drip
We are right, we are good, yes
Nod your head easy, meek and mild
It’s them what’s wrong, big scary them
Growling at the threshold, oh little lambs
You’ll be perfectly safe, long as you’re afraid.

Think not on this world’s woes
Let the wounds suppurate and fester
The stench just angel baby’s breath
A grave made of this world
For the empty dark hole of the next,
You know it folks, step right up
All it takes is evetything you’ve got
From now till forever and ever amen.

So the dirt clogs lungs,
Clots beneath eyelashes
Lips sewn shut by scarabs and worms
Isn’t it lovely, the next life
So cozy beneath blankets of fruitless earth
Barren and threadbare bereft
Choking on aspirin bitter
Ashes under the tongue, we all fall down.

Fear is never a word that should describe “home”
Desperation has been defined
In the ruins of a father’s face
Crumpled helpless hands slack
Beneath the impossible weight of t-shirt, jeans, new sneakers
Soaking up the morning surf
Emblem of bodies throwing themselves
Into the thoughtless, indifferent waves.

All sense of direction is lost
Just how fast and how far
Clinging to scraps of what was a life
Finding a place where prayer and hope offer no comfort
As one hand let’s go of what can’t be saved
To clutch feverish at that which may still
How many times can anyone
Keep making Soloman’s choice?

Is there actual refuge?
Bereft of any dignity, hands in the air
All hope pinned upon humanity being remembered
By the terminally forgetful
Crying out for mercy only to have it fall
Upon ears dumb to the language,
The subtle speech of so much grief
Lost among the clamor of not our problem.

Dear ***,
I’ve tried writing this letter so many times over the years and every time I could either not find the words I wanted or I let my cowardice win and deleted it, convincing myself there was really no point in writing it, that committing myself in writing served no useful or constructive purpose. I’m still not convinced this will do any good, but I think it can’t really hurt either. It’s not like I think you’ll actually ever read it and even if you did happen to come across it I truly don’t think it will matter that much, not now, not after so much time and distance between us and now. What was “us” anyway really? A little bit more than a year when we were both still kids? Nearly twenty years in between filled with other people, experiences, good, bad, or indifferent but all changing and shaping each of us into two people who may not even recognize each other if they passed on the street?

Only for me, I know that’s just a little bit of bullshit. I’d know you anywhere. When you can’t stop thinking of someone, picturing their face, holding on to the sound of their voice it makes remembering very easy. I honestly haven’t ever stopped thinking of you, not once. At first they were all angry thoughts, trying to justify myself I guess, distance myself from my own stupidity and selfishness. They changed though, over the years. I replayed everything out over and over, all the moments, all the conversations, all of the mistakes I made just coming clearer over time. I was a shitty boyfriend, from start to finish, there’s no way I can deny that fact. I took you for granted, what you were and how special that was, how rare. So now when I think about you, all I can feel is guilt and regret.

There’s the big word, “regret”. You are, among all of my many regrets, the biggest by far. Kind of late in the game to realize this, but it’s true. I never once stopped loving you, no matter what I actually said. It’s quite possible that you’re the only woman I can truly say that I do love, that I can honestly use that word for. I’ve told other women that I loved them, and I’ve always wanted to mean it, I’ve convinced myself thoroughly that I did mean it but the thing is I don’t miss any of them. Not like I miss you. Some days I think all that I am is missing you, not a person, just this raw walking streak of loss. I know with a grim certainty that I will go to my grave missing you just as certainly as I know that I won’t ever see you in the flesh in this life again. And that’s my fault.

I think I’ve tried to evade that fact for a long time, tried to twist out from under it for years yet I can’t deny it any more. I could make excuses, I have made excuses, I was young, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was stupid and foolish and just fairly horrible all around. But those are reasons, not any kind of justification. In the end, I convinced myself that this wasn’t love, that there was this mythical something out there, that despite believing for all of my miserable life that there is a “one” that you weren’t it. I’m very good at convincing myself into things. Most of the time in doing so, I hurt people, just leave a lot of wreckage in my wake. No more so when I walked away from you. If it helps any, not that I think it will, I hate myself so much for doing that. I’m so angry all of the time and I can pretend it’s because of the state of the world, my disgust with humanity and all of its failings, or whatever other high handed bullshit I can scrape together but in the end I’m angry that I threw something precious away and I have no one to blame but myself. I punish myself every day, I use memories of you to beat myself raw and bloody because I don’t think I can ever suffer enough to make up for my mistakes.

That doesn’t really matter though. It’s not going to make any difference in the end. I’ll still do it, but it’s a pretty useless and futile gesture. Even if I could look you in the eye right now and tell you how sorry I am, would it matter? You’ve gone on to have loves of your own, you’ve built a life, struggled, suffered, become someone who might in some way remember a boy who broke your heart once upon a time. My relevance in your life is a negative, something so much less than nothing. Fuck, I’m just close to being a complete stranger to you now. I like to tell myself that that’s why I’ve never written this down before, that at best all of this would be an awkward and unwelcome reminder of something that once was, at worst it’s just pulling open an old scar best left closed. The truth is though that I’ve never committed to anything, not you, not my life, my writing, my marriage, nothing. I’m too scared, too much of a god damn coward to lay everything down and make a choice for better or worse. So much of my life is filled with moments where I let events unfold until all the choices where made for me, except once, and I made the wrong motherfucking choice.

I really don’t know what all of this is, why I’m writing this. There always seems so much I want to say but it never comes out just right. Maybe there’s no right way to say this, maybe I could start talking now and never be able to explain everything, just keep talking until my voice got lost but I’d still be making the words with cracked and broken lips because it will take me the rest of my life to truly convey all of the pain and anger and regret I hold inside of me. The bottom line though will always be this and this alone. I love you. I always have, I do right now and I always will for the rest of my wretched life. I always keep the hope that you will find your happiness, that for every hurt you will find the remedy. I want you to always know how beautiful, intelligent, amazing and truly wonderfully weird you are and I hope you will always keep who you are and feel that strength. I will never, ever be a part of your world ever again but I hope I can always find some way of knowing that you are out there and doing well.

I guess that’s pretty much all I have to say. It’s not really, but at some point the words have to stop. I just want to leave you with this and then I’ll stop. No matter what happens know this one thing as the truth. There will ALWAYS be one man who loves you, who thinks you are the most incredible person he has ever known and believes with all of his heart that the world is truly better and special and magic because you grace it. Know that sweet, beautiful girl.

I don’t sleep any more, not really. Whatever happens when I close my eyes is fitful and restless, plagued by strange dreams that I can’t remember but still they haunt my blood, my bones. I can’t remember what it’s like to rest, I feel like a ghost haunting myself, something wearing my skin but loosely, ill fitting, a child in its father’s Sunday suit, the one he’ll be buried in. I can’t tell the time any more either, I’m aware of the hours yet they make no sense, I am just here and it is always now while the sun wheels through the sky until it doesn’t any longer and the stars wheel instead. I feel lost in this body, I’m longing to touch but I forget how, or am fearful that I’m forgetting, that if I found another body to touch it would be foreign, strange, alien, a collection of obtuse geometries and unfamiliar geographies, like trying to kiss the dust of Mars or run my fingers through the tresses if Valhalla, or thrust into the cold brightness of the Milky Way becoming dizzy and lost in the slow spinning. This is where my thoughts lay, not in my head, outside of it, spinning on vast wheels, twisting from the carding combs into thin, fine threads that tangle, twist like streams of blue smoke from my lips, twining about my fingers in wreaths, hanging from around my neck as beads, thick garlands of holly and mistletoe, talismans, fetishes, skulls or relics, fragments collected in silver filigree or golden ligaments. I am dissolving, I know this, becoming something more and less, a collection of scrolls, bright capitals, illuminated by slow, worshipful hands, the crook of my neck becomes the bell of a trumpet, my belly a cluster of grapes, limbs sheafs of wheat ripe for the reaping, my teeth a flick of lambs lead by the shepherd of my tongue. My skin in the flaying and scraping becomes fine parchment, laid flat, a map of veins and arteries slowly scraped palimpsest, pricked by stylus, scored for new lines, letters small insects crawling along the ladder of my vertebrae, dense text to be read aloud to the canonical hours, some strange liturgy preformed by imbecile mummers to the tune of washboard and rib cage. I become the sounds made by whippoorwills, the burbling of doves in Saint Mark’s Square, a vast thunder of wings, a pinwheel of dusty feathers purple black bruising the fair sky, falling to bits and pieces kept in mason jars like rainwater or rose petals or all the odd screws, nails, door hinges, the bits of oddments that once had purpose but now sleep beneath the rust, crumbling as wood, an old barn falling to the embrace of time, the vegetal insistence of ivy, writhing green and suffocating through lungs tanned and leathern, smith’s bellows cracking, abandoned, unable to draw full breath only fitful wheezing, as fitful as the sleep I can no longer find behind the locked doors of cathedrals that stand alone and pointless amidst naves of trees, open forever to the predations of foxes and crows, those who dream up from the black earth towards the black skies where the stars stop wheeling, become fixed points from which I hang, broke bodied, pendulum, swaying from the neck, all of the joints out of place, rotting under the canals of Venice. Oily waters embrace, filling the empty corners, perhaps here is sleep, beneath the forgetful ceaseless waves, bereft of names, wandering ribbons of ragged white funeral lace, within the deeps, drifting down and down and down until bones twist into strange driftwood tangles, sea smoothed, salt waters carving the ivory beneath the flesh into scrimshaw, bending, warping all of the architecture until it loops and I’m biting my tail, devouring my own flesh, what sacrament could this now be, I don’t even like wine, but my blood is sweet and if I should drink it all down like milk of the poppy, like Buckley’s cough mixture will I finally lay me down to sleep, the kind I no longer know or remember knowing or forget in the remembering? I cannot say, I am tired yet no nepenthe, just ceaseless rustling of all the pages of me left to write.

You would say that your skin
Was fallen leaves
As you sat, small as you could be
Looking out the window,
Rain painting teardrop shadows
Your hands gathered up to your lips
Like you didn’t want any more words to escape.

You’d get mad at me
For stealing them, your words
Because to me they were playthings
To be bent and twisted about
I couldn’t help it though
I am after all
Just a thief of words.

You thought I didn’t take you seriously
Saying “you’re stitching my breath to pages,
I can’t breathe spread out over corpses”
But I couldn’t understand
All I could hear was the pen scratching
You hated that sound,
Said it felt like ants under your skin
Itching and prickling.

Maybe I should have left a few alone
You stood in the doorway
Telling me you couldn’t even cry
I’d written all of your tears into deserts
But I don’t think I even looked up
Until you were gone
Now I just scribble down everything you ever said
Hoping I can write you back.

There is a fire burning in my chest
It’s stoked by fingers reaching from the pastthatrandompoet

Does porcelain become brassUnder heat and flame? Can her hands glow even brighter Any part of her shine As her eyes do Through the smoke and wrack of memory?

If any fingers could stir Cold ash to wakeful tongues Of hiss crackling orange and red They could only be her’s The girl crowned and clothed In autumn copper herself.

Does she know That her hands run through my veins? Still to this day Card through the warp and weft Of my tangled skeinMaking a cat’s cradle Cutting bloody slivers of my heart With the same indifference any child gives To such games?

Of course she doesn’t I turned away from any such hope I have my answers Knowing I will burn again and again and again Each time cold ashes are stirred To quickening light By hands that could only ever be her’s.

My birthday is coming up soon. I’m saying this only to provide some context for the state of my mind, not for any possible response this event might elicit. In point of fact if there are any birthday related remarks that end up in the comments section of any of the various social media this post might show up in those comments will be deleted and their perpetrators will be hunted down with extreme prejudice. I don’t really like to acknowledge my birth any more than I absolutely have to as I’m convinced that the fact that I manged to successfully not die for another year isn’t particularly worth commemorating in any significant fashion. That, however, is rather secondary to my thoughts of late.
Contained on this blog are roughly twenty years of my life. I started writing seriously, poetry in particular, when I was around fourteen and that very first poem can be found on here as well as every other piece I consider to be kind of good enough up to the present. I used to write as a young child as well, but never very seriously, mostly just heavily plagiarizing from the various fantasy series I used to read, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms specifically but I never really thought of writing as something I would want to do until I was a teenager. I probably never would have started writing poetry if it hadn’t been for a project in my ninth grade English class and the subsequent support of my teacher Mrs. Crossen. She really seemed to like what I wrote and I would often spend my lunch in her classroom, showing her each new piece. I wonder now though if I was ever really excited about the words or just that I found something I was good at, in fact, I think about it quite often.
All my life I heard the word “potential” used around me, about me, it was something I was apparently full of, teachers and parents and other miscellaneous family were always going on about how much I had or looking at me rather sternly and telling me I was wasting it. The thing is, I never saw it, this miraculous potential. I was average, I am average, just like the majority of the human beings on this planet. I would never say that I excelled at anything in my life or had any particularly outstanding talents. I’m alright in a variety of fields, but I’d never go beyond describing my intellect, physical prowess or appearance, social interaction, or any other skill or characteristic to go beyond general competence. Sometimes I wonder if that is really why I latched on to this idea of being a writer, because suddenly I was good at something and it was something a lot of other people weren’t. I question if I ever really had passion at all or if it was just another mask I put on to blend in, fit somewhere, even if that somewhere happened to be the fringe.
I used to write every day, but as the years passed I slowed down, until at times it’s been months between pieces. I’ve never seriously sought publication, I haven’t gone through the arduous process of submission and rejection in endless cycle. Twenty years and a handful of pieces have appeared in print, most of those in my high school yearbook mostly because I was the only other person to submit. This was supposed to be something I wanted to do, a direction and a path to follow, what I based a lot of important decisions around but if I really wanted to do it, don’t you think I would have actually done it by now, or at least tried?
I think maybe that what I liked more than the words was the recognition. Within a limited group I was “The Writer”, passionate, intellectual, iconoclastic, and I received a certain amount of respect. If I really tried to make this a profession, if I went beyond the comfortable circle jerk of local readings and poetry blogs I think I would find out that the thought lingering and nagging at the back of my brain was correct, that I am mediocre at best. That would then be the end, the whole conceit crashing down and I don’t think I could take that. So I have stayed safe, preserved this kind of fantasy by never leaving the little pond with all my little fishy friends, where I can enjoy this illusion of being big. If I don’t really try I can’t fail.
Hey, I chose the monicker of “Imposter” for myself right? Deep down I think I know that I am a fake. All the words are indeed mine, but the motivation behind them is just to project something that really isn’t there, the distraction a magician needs to make the switch before the “ooo’s” and “ahhs”. I feel some times like I pretend at everything, mask upon mask upon mask, until I am not even sure who I really am any more, or if there is a me left inside. At the last, maybe there’s just the empty space inside the smallest nesting doll and that’s it. It’s gotten to the point were mirrors are frightening, there’s this person in them and I’m not sure who it is any more, like the reflection is not even familiar. Perhaps writing is the illusion I show myself, to allow me to believe I have something remotely like a purpose, that I still have dreams.
Who knows? I don’t and I’m not even really sure if I could stand up to the answers. Truth has always been my greatest enemy and I really don’t think I’m strong enough to really take it. I know I am not writing this for any insight. I’m writing just to get this out. It has always been a very ironic occurrence that these little personal ramblings always elicit the most comment, mostly in the form of fairly useless self help platitudes I think are more for the commentator’s benefit than for mine. That being said, I want to close with this, I am not writing this for attention or sympathy or pity. I can hear the scoff of disbelief as this is being put up on the world wide web, the thing is, I don’t see it as the crying wolf everyone else probably will. I put this personal shit out there not as a shout but as a single tiny voice in a crowd of billions, a tiny single raindrop in an ocean of constant information that is then consumed by all of the other opinions and confessions and sound bites and memes or other effluent that clutters up the margins of the information super highway. I make these little confessionals with the same intent as someone going out to the middle of the woods to scream out their frustrations, not to be heard but just to do it. So, just to nip any thoughts of offering your two cents in the bud, I wouldn’t waste your breath on this piece. Seriously, I am The Beautiful Imposter, so how can you believe any of this?

emisformake
The blog of my sissy-poo and the person responsible for me creating my own blog…so you can all blame her and while you’re at it check out her fantastically insane levels of creativity and talent